Monmouth County - Lincroft - Artist Gallery Talk and Book Signing: Stephen Barnwell: Captial Offenses
Artist Gallery Talk and Book Signing
Stephen Barnwell: Captial Offenses
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
My technique for creating this body of work is digital collage. I assemble quite large collages in Photoshop from scans of original, public-domain engravings from my collection of hundreds of vintage books and periodicals from the late 19th century. My style of collage is one that does not look like a collage, but rather a seamless, unified image. This requires spending hours upon hours searching for each individual element in the work, which often comprises hundreds of elements, to find not just an appropriate image, but one that is compatible with the total collage. These elements are scanned at a very high resolution, cleaned, resized and manipulated, and then added to the final assemblage. They are printed on my own high-resolution color laser printer, one at a time, with unique serial numbers. I also like to add multimedia elements to the prints, such as stickers, stamps, seals, embossing, and watermarks to give the prints a lush, textured look, which also makes them unique hand-made artworks, rather than simple prints.
Stephen Barnwell is a professional artist, working in printmaking, illustration, and book design. His prints have been exhibited internationally in museums including the Palais de Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum in Paris, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in California, the Altmärkisches Museum in Stendal, Germany, and the Lahti Art Museum in Lahti, Finland.
Barnwell has been in over eighty exhibitions in galleries across the country and around the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Santa Barbara, Houston, London, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Brussels, Naples, Seville, Budapest, Copenhagen, Finland, Hungary, and Bulgaria.
His prints are in private collections in all fifty US states and in fifty-one countries around the globe, and they are in the permanent collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles, the Haupt Collection in Berlin, the Lake Eustis Art Museum in Florida, and Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania. Among other awards, Barnwell has won the Frederick Bartholomew Award from the American Color Print Society in Philadelphia, and his work has been featured in two monographs, Capital Offenses and MoneyArt, published by Antarctica Arts.
Stephen Barnwell was born in Rutherford, NJ in 1960. He received his BFA from Bard College in 1983.
A full resume is available at StephenBarnwell.com/resume.html.
